There’s a moment in the Season 4 première of “Homeland” when Carrie Mathison, the show’s brilliant but unstable protagonist, looks into the face of a survivor of a wedding party destroyed by an air strike in Pakistan that she approved. Forty civilians appear to be dead; there are shrouds around the small bodies of children, which have been laid out in a row. She stares at the survivor, a young man, who is surrounded by the near-immolated remains of his family, from the safe remove of a control room, his image relayed by drone. The drone is low enough for him to spot; he stares back at Carrie in a form of acknowledgment unique to our era—recognition by technological proxy.
For a show that is frequently overwrought and heavy-handed, the moment is a perfectly calibrated inversion. Later in the episode, as Carrie Skypes with her sister and the infant daughter she’s left in her care, the point becomes clear: the same technologies that allow us to maintain human connections also allow us to extinguish them, to take lives with dimmed moral awareness. Images that, in one context, keep us tethered to our humanity are, in another, just a sanitized array of pixels, more avatar than individual. The distinction between innocent bystander and collateral damage can be filament-thin.
In “Homeland,” Peter Quinn, a C.I.A. colleague of Carrie’s, asks her about her work ordering in drone strikes, “checking names off a kill list for a living”:
To Carrie’s mind, they had gambled away their innocence.
There are other images that, perhaps, should challenge us more than they do. The iconography of modern warfare is virtually indistinguishable from that of the video game, and it’s become a feat of conscience to remind ourselves that the footage we’ve seen of American actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere—grainy, gray aerials that culminate in a silent detonation—represent something real. We’ve crept down this path in increments for the past thirteen years, some of them obvious, others nearly unnoticeable, and arrived at a place that should deeply concern us all.
We tend to think of innocence as a moral absolute, but it operates most often as a kind of currency, and like all currencies its value is prone to fluctuations. The unintentional effect of this has been to produce a levelling of the dead. Human Rights Watch estimates that upward of twenty-six hundred people have been killed by American drone strikes; many of them may have posed no more of a threat to us than the journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff posed to ISIS. The point here is not to suggest that a democracy and a death cult are at all morally equivalent. They are not. But the bystanders subject to the protocols of both groups were innocent and now are dead.
That we should confront these questions in 2014, in the centennial of the onset of the First World War, is a particular irony. The conflict marked a dawning recognition of the human capacity to create horror. It’s possible to understand the history of the twentieth century through its relationship to the ideal of innocence. Fallen soldiers become statistics, and then, in an act of transfiguration, the millions of dead become concretely human again when seen en masse: the scale is so large that it reminds us of the real possibility of self-annihilation. In the wake of the Second World War, nations began signing on to the fourth Geneva Convention, a protocol on the treatment of civilians in time of war. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the collapses of colonialism, Fascism, and Communism paved the way for broader recognition of individual freedoms previously denied, rejecting what had amounted to imposed statuses of perpetual non-innocence. In the United States, the struggles for civil and equal rights were, in effect, efforts to negate mass indictments based on identity.
We now suffer from a seepage of historical memory. We are not alone in this.
The currency of innocence has been devalued. Our conception of self-defense, both domestically and internationally, has become boundlessly elastic. Technology made it possible to wage war remotely, but the scene from “Homeland” asks the question: What if we were forced to reckon with the humanity of those whom our actions affect? Lacking the will to grapple with those concerns, we turn to euphemisms and rationales. “Collateral damage” is a term for insurance assessors, the moral equivalent of saying that mistakes were made by someone unspecified. It has no place in discussions of innocent human lives lost. Oblique language and passive terminology cannot obscure a foundational truth of this era, one that we’ve become comfortable with not discussing: we are all anchored to a time and place, all connected to a nation or region or culture or religion, in conflict with another. If this be the measure, none of us are innocent. We are all combatants now.
Later in the fourth-season première of “Homeland,” Carrie comes close to drowning her infant daughter in a bathtub. The camera takes the perspective of the baby looking up, dipping under the water, like a person on the ground looking up through the clouds at a machine in the sky. It is harder to know what Carrie sees.
